OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/6162/Genesi_Selects_Motorola_7447A_CPU_for_Upcoming_Pegasos_G4_line
Exploring the Future of Computingen-usCopyright 2001-2016, David Adamsadam+nospam@osnews.comFri, 09 Dec 2016 16:22:47 GMThttp://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gifOSNews.comhttp://www.osnews.com
No G5?http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?Just curious. Is it prohibitively expensive to do G5 motherboards? You'd think a board that supported the PPC 970 chip would be a bit more future-friendly...

AvivaWed, 25 Feb 2004 18:17:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentsre: No G5?http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?Well, they just have to drop the 7447A in there.
there is no development costs invovled.

I think they mentionned that the Pegasos 3 will be running a G5.Wed, 25 Feb 2004 18:32:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentsyeshttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?ya it will and i can't wait i iwll buy 2 of them heheWed, 25 Feb 2004 18:35:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsRe: No G5?http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?Thanks, as I said was just wondering. Makes sense for a drop-in replacement I suppose. Wed, 25 Feb 2004 18:38:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsMorphOS is the only one listedhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?BBRV forgot to include that MorphOS is the ONLY OS that is validated on the 7447A.Wed, 25 Feb 2004 18:43:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentsnot cool for amigahttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?seems like one in the eye for amiga, i do hope that there are amiga one boards that support this and the ppc 970 that i heard is going in a pegasos.
the amiga one mini itx is gonna be good though, will put amiga in the industrial-area if not anything else.Wed, 25 Feb 2004 18:49:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsRe: Not coolhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?"Seems like one in the eye for Amiga, I do hope that there are AmigaOne boards that support this and the PPC 970 that I heard is going in a Pegasos."

Both companies have to wait until there is a suitable chipset available for 9xx PPCs. So far as I can tell, the Apple chipset is the only one right now.

I do wonder why IBM are not selling a chipset with their processors.Wed, 25 Feb 2004 19:29:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsRe: Not cool (Chipset)http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?Chipsets for the PPC970 are available from MarvellWed, 25 Feb 2004 19:44:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsMotorollin'http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?Whats great about this CPU is that its very powerful -

1.3+ghz with half the power consumption/heat of the regular 7447. This packs power and performance with fanless/silent computing.

This is the Future!

If you look at the AppleG5 machine you can see that the WHOLE BOX IS A BIG HEATSINK.. Its massive and heavy. Hey the 970 is a nice cpu though but its still in infancy stage.

The ability to have a nicem, small footprint, fanless, cool, and silent PowerPC workstation running at 1.3ghz + on a G4 with Altivec support, DDR Ram, standard PC cards, and GigEthernet ONBOARD is Incredible.

Combine this with the Open Firmware and ability to run over 17 Operating Systems you have a

Re-Evolution in computing!

The Native PPC Operating System of the Pegasos - MorphOS has an almost real-time responsive feel.

Indeed. He apparently works for: www.magneticsystemsnyc.com and sells these systems...shameless plug eh?Wed, 25 Feb 2004 20:09:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsHRMhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?If I know more about this pagas and it's os such as is it user friendly to a windows/linux user that is use to x86 stuff mostly working? I might consider buying one. However I'm not going to dump a lot of money into pagas stuff and I find out it's just a lot of crap. Not when the same amount of money can be dump into something just as powerful that I know I can use easily.

--IdoxashWed, 25 Feb 2004 20:11:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsRe: HRMhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?Well, what would you like to know? Can't tell you what you'd like to know unless you let us know what you'd need to hear in order to make such a decision.Wed, 25 Feb 2004 20:22:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentsbut...http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?it would make sense to have a chipset that supported either the motoGx or the IBMpower...

but, asking them to make sense?

gee, that's funnyWed, 25 Feb 2004 20:23:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsPPC Vs. X86 match uphttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?I for one would like to see OS News do a comparison of the Pegasos vs. a generic X86 processer using linux. I am still not a firm follower of the "mhz myth"

What would the differences in speed be using the following:
1. Gimp
2. Mozilla
3. KDE and Gnome
4. Open Office

I am tired of the adobe comparisons of mac vs. windows.Wed, 25 Feb 2004 20:23:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsHere is another one!http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?Hi Shawn, here is another one...:-)

These boards ship against this plan:

1) An OPEN platform based on OpenFirmware that can support multiple OS environment, that is, build and run what you want or buy it fully configured as the ODW. Thanks to Motorola we will be selling these to their embedded system customers. We are also selling these to Developers that join this site daily (and others like it):

2) A blade server aimed at the low end server market with better than low end performance. That is a new board BTW.

3) A much smaller board with the same features for the "Digital Home" market and MorphOS to go with it. If fact, it does not really matter if it is used with a monitor in one way or a PlasmaTV in another. What is important is the broadband internet connection and the smart card to go with it. What you want, when you want it. Entertainment is what drives technology into the home. We just want to help people do what they do already better.

All that this year. And, thank you to excuse magnetic -- he is just motivated...;-)

R&BWed, 25 Feb 2004 20:26:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsWaitinghttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?I am watinting for MorphOS 1.5. There is just too many things that need 3rd party software to be able to do right now. Like Tcp/IP is not native right now, among some other things. I really hope that the next version is the one I can use. I hope, I hope....Wed, 25 Feb 2004 20:46:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentsyes...http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?yes that would be niceWed, 25 Feb 2004 20:54:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentstcp/iphttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?i saw there was some working with this for aros, maybe genesi and aros could have tried to make it together? would have saved both parts some work and been good to the community aswell.Wed, 25 Feb 2004 21:52:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentslink to aros regarding tcp/iphttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?i might just as well give you a link - http://www.thenostromo.com/teamaros/bounty_details_3.htmlWed, 25 Feb 2004 21:54:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsRE: PPC Vs. X86 match uphttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?> What would the differences in speed be using the following:

I'd also like a comparison of compile times (preferably of a big package like glibc, or a gentoo bootstrap) between them. I always wondered how well (fast) PPCs do compiling.Wed, 25 Feb 2004 22:12:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Comments&quot;MHz Myth&quot;http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?Hi David, we just had a good discussion about that here:

"We all know the PowerPC is an efficient CPU and that the Pegasos has a much better MIPS per watt number than today's x86 CPUs. Heat dissipation also becomes a real problem for PC's now, as air cooling is not likely to be not enough for a greater than 4 GHz clock speed. We could measure the power consumption with external equipment, but that does not tell the whole story either.

Then, there is the efficiency of the code itself, so just watts per number of digits processed is not the whole story either. For example, our distributed.net client beats even the 3.2 GHz x86 on a 1 GHZ G4.

We need to something catchy to dispell the MHz myth. We might as well throw the my memory is bigger than your memory misnomer out too. It is partly a marketing thing and partly a genuinely accurate indication that PegPower is really something!

We need way to describe the efficiency, speed and work accomplished in a way that puts out out front in terms of performance where we are. "

Hope you apprciate the discussion that follows on MorphZone!

R&BWed, 25 Feb 2004 22:32:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsGreat !http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?I'm a long time Pegasos1 user and waiting to receive my Peg2 G4 :-D.
I hope all the horses in that computer will be well exploited by
Morphos developpers and good coders !!Wed, 25 Feb 2004 22:37:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentsmissing tcp/ip?http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?@David: why in the world would an os be missing something like tcp/ip when there are all those bsds about?Wed, 25 Feb 2004 23:14:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentsdnetchttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?It only beats *some* x86 cpus.

Pentium 4 IIRC. Try going up against AMD in those speeds.Wed, 25 Feb 2004 23:44:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Comments RE: missing tcp/iphttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?I have no idea why, but MorphOS does not have a native Tcp/IP stack. You can use a 3rd part solution, neither of which I have. I do belive there are other things like this also, USB 2? But I am not certain what they are. I would really like to get my hands on MorphOS but not until it is more "feature" complete.Thu, 26 Feb 2004 00:59:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentsmissing TCP/IP and Gentoohttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?Hi,
as for missing TCP/IP there are a couple of "free" (as in demo versions) available from AmiNet that work well enough for the time being. For those of you who own AmigaOS 3.9 you can install Genesis from the AmigaOS CD to get a fully working (and simple to use) TCP/IP stack.
MorphOS is a very young platform that has been developed by people for free and I think that it has come very far if you compare it to other freely developed operating systems. The only sad thing I think is that they made such a leap in versioning before having gotten something as important as TCP/IP into the main OS distribution. But on a whole the MorphOS experience is nice and there is definately more to come in the future.

For those who do not find MorphOS fitting to their needs just yet there are several GNU/Linux distributions available for the platform, as well as OpenBSD. Debian and Gentoo has already been ported, Mandrake has been ported and an installer will be available soon I hear. YellowDog will also be available soon. If people want to hold off buying a Pegasos just because they don't find MorphOS mature yet they are missing out on something in my opinion as there are plenty of options available already.

@Gabriel Edner:
If you are looking for sheer compilation speed the P4 beats the G4 without a doubt. The i686 platform has been around for a long time and it has a much larger userbase. GCC does a better job on i686 as it has had more developers and more time to advance. A good thing is that Apple chose GCC for OSX since this means they are spending money to improve it. I'm hoping we will see more powerful optimisations in the near future.
Where the G4 beats the P4 is where applications have been designed to make use of AltiVec. In AltiVec enabled software we almost always see the PowerPC beat the i686-platform (examples are the recent dnetc benchmark made in the MorphOS 1.5 alpha and the Photoshop benchmarks released by Apple while marketing the G5). Because PowerPC development slowed off a bit after the G4 was released companies looked to AltiVec to make their applications be on par on MacOS compared to Windows. This had the fortunate effect that (in at least my opinion) AltiVec intrinsics has been much better integrated with the compiler (such as GCC) than SSE or 3DNow intrinsics. And Apple provides some really good and easy to follow guidelines to how to make use of AltiVec in your applications.

As IBM is taking over development of the PowerPC processor I think we will see more rapid progress in the years to come. The RISC design is much nicer to work with as a programmer compared to the dated CISC (used by x86), again, this is imho but I believe most would agree with me.
Given a little time and faith I believe both the PowerPC platform and MorphOS can gain some interest. But, today, MorphOS probably does not offer much to users who are not accustomed to AmigaOS. I'm personally looking forward to what 1.5 will have to offer though. I have high hopes for the platform.

Until about half a year ago when I bought the Pegasos I was a huge fan of x86. When friends showed me the benefits of the PowerPC CPU I was an easy convert. I hope more people start to realise the potential of the processor now that the Pegasos is available since it is actually affordable compared to a PowerMac.Thu, 26 Feb 2004 01:55:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsG5 CPUhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?@Don Cox:

>Both companies have to wait until there is a suitable chipset available for 9xx PPCs.
>So far as I can tell, the Apple chipset is the only one right now.

I miss your commitment to the exciting G5 x86-beater this year. Thu, 26 Feb 2004 02:50:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentsnohttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?>...has been developed by people for free ...

no they people working on morphos get payed for it...it is not a "spare time" projectThu, 26 Feb 2004 03:43:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsLet's Seehttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?"Well, what would you like to know? Can't tell you what you'd like to know unless you let us know what you'd need to hear in order to make such a decision."

Simple: Will I be able to set this thing up at home and get right onto the net, start up some music, surf the net, check email, get around in the OS with ease? Will this thing use my modem that works on my x86 computer? How about audio cards, video cards, ect ...? If I can't at least get decent video let's say at 1280x1024 with my lcd, get onto the net ect ... then this system is not worth my time "in my opinion as of right now" however If I can use this system with ease and it works then kewl. I can see in throwing a few 100 dollars more at it instead of x86. However the most I'm even planing to spend with making stuff work for my computer is useing Linux MDK 9.2 so if that OS and your hardware is harder to deal with then that dune xpect to many ppl to be buying them. Just the hardcore geeky ppl that has the time on their hands.

--IdoxashThu, 26 Feb 2004 05:30:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsResponseshttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?@magnetic:
Actually, this new variant of the G4 isn't impressive at all. It consumes 20w at 1.4GHz, which is about the same as the G5 at 1.25GHz. The 90-nm variant of the G5 should consume even less power than that. The 7447A still has the totally outdated and slow main memory bus that the G4 was hampered with. Thus, you can expect the G5, even at a lower clock-speed, to be significantly faster than the G4 on compute-intensive code.

The current G5 machines are giant heat-sinks, but that is not because the G5 is a particularly hot chip (it isn't). Rather, Apple realizes that lots of large, slow fans are much less noise than a number of small, very fast fans.Thu, 26 Feb 2004 06:12:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentsmac os?http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?technically, since this is a power pc setup, you could install mac os on it right?Thu, 26 Feb 2004 06:29:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)Commentsmac os, sorta..http://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?You have to have an Apple ROM to run Mac OS. With MOL (Mac on Linux) and something like Yellow Dog you can run Mac OS without the ROM on pretty much any PPC setup. It's pretty fast, but def initely not native. Networking and other hardware IO can be a bit of a pain.Thu, 26 Feb 2004 06:44:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsMorphOShttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?@poundsmack:

Please don't misslead the peoples here. Your dnet client is using altivec where the bit rotating is really fast which one is slow on x86 cpus. But this is good ONLY for rc5 and nowhere else beats 1Ghz G4 the 3.2 Ghz x86. So, dnetc myth doesn't reflects the real life.
(Yeah, and your dnet client is not public, "so maybe doesn't exists" while MorphOS1.4 doesn't altivec enabled.)

But it was a nice effort!
Good luck with the new processor, I hope we could test it ASAP in the Peg2! That would be nice.Thu, 26 Feb 2004 10:17:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsG4 speedmonsterhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?>Yeah, and your dnet client is not public, "so maybe doesn't exists"

The current version of MOS 1.4.x does not ship atm with a tcp/ip stack. HOWEVER, there are 3 free ones available that work very nicely. We do have a native mos ppc stack that works in house and will be released soon.

The best thing about Morphos out of the box when you get your Peg2 is that you also get a Full SDK for Free (all furthur OS updates are FREE to) which includes a GCC compiler so anything OpenSourced for Linux PPC can be Ported! There is also a developer IRC channel and 2 Developer Websites:

ByeThu, 26 Feb 2004 18:55:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsRe: comparing x86 and ppchttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?Please stop comparing G5's to P4 trash.
The prescott is a hugely inefficient, huge power waster.
I very seriously believe more valid comparisons are between an opteron/athlonFX and G5, especially when it comes to power usage, throughput, etc.Thu, 26 Feb 2004 19:02:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsFor BBRVhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?Well, there is one board, which uses the PowerPC 970FX processors. Check in: http://www.970eval.com/. Its specs are:

Full Size ATX Form-factor.
Dual IBM PowerPC 970/970FX Processors.

PowerPC 970 NorthBridge.
Two point-to-point PowerPC interfaces, running at up to 1GHz.
AGP 8X Interface.
HyperTransport interface, running at up to 1.2GHz.
DDR SDRAM memory controller, dual channel (128-bits + ECC), up to 16GigaBytes of SDRAM supported. Special MUX feature uses only one pair of DIMMs at a time.

PLX HT7520 HyperTransport tunnel, with two PCI-X interfaces, each capable of running at 133MHz.
One PCI-X interface is hooked up to two 64-bit PCI connectors.
The other PCI-X interface is hooked directly to an Intel 82546ER Dual Gigabit Ethernet device.

Off topic: Bill, Raquel, I've sent you the questions for the interview two times about 3 weeks ago, but still haven't got any answer. What had happened?

Akuji.Fri, 27 Feb 2004 13:30:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsContacted one of the sellershttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?I've contacted one of the U.S. distributers (http://www.ultraspec.us/pegasos.htm) about possilbly doing a demo at our monthly LUG meeting. They seemed pretty open to the idea. I'll let you if it pans out.Fri, 27 Feb 2004 17:46:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsRE: For BBRVhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?"Well, there is one board, which uses the PowerPC 970FX processors. Check in: http://www.970eval.com/."

Kewl at first to you see the price ... 6000 dollars? LOL, come on I want to use IBM neat lill tech too but till they can put out cpus that are on par with Intel and AMD cpus in cost they will remain a small force. I hardly doubt anyone but geeks and big bussy would put that much money into a mobo with some ram and dual cpus.

--IdoxashFri, 27 Feb 2004 20:28:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous)CommentsRE: For BBRVhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?Have you noticed, that this board is for development? It's not for personal use.

And, besides that, it's sold as full computer, with 1 Gig of memory, case, HDD and complete documentation about this board.